“We are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official said of Musk’s role in the war in Ukraine. “That sucks.”Photo illustration by Matt Chase; Source photographs from Getty; Shutterstock Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in par

第二次世界大戦中に日本によって連行された朝鮮人女性たちは自ら売春婦になることを選んだのだ、と主張するJ・マーク・ラムザイヤー氏による論文に対して、ソウル市内で抗議する学生たちクリス・ジャング撮影/ヌール・フォト/シャッターストック Read in English | 英語で読む | Read in Korean | 한국어 번역 보기 私は今年の1月、第二次世界大戦中の戦地に設置された「慰安所」に送り込まれ、旧日本軍兵士たちに性的サービスを提供させられた女性や少女たち、いわゆる「従軍慰安婦」に対して行なわれた残虐行為に関して、韓国の裁判所から最近日本に出された賠償命令について執筆しようと、論文のアウトラインを練っているところだった。この女性たちはアジア内外の各国で強制的に、あるいは詐欺行為によって捕らえられたのだが、その多くは当時日本の植民地であった朝鮮から来たのであった。被害者数について

Of course I have a lot of memories of my father. It’s only natural, considering that we lived under the same roof of our not exactly spacious home from the time I was born until I left home at eighteen. And, as is the case with most children and parents, I imagine, some of my memories of my father are happy, some not quite so much. But the memories that remain most vividly in my mind now fall into

The publicity-averse Maryam Mirzakhani, who died Friday, is the only woman ever to win the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor.Photograph by Mariana Cook The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on Friday, at the age of forty, was known to her colleagues as a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces—“science-fiction mathematics,” one admirer called it—and to her young

The new White House communications director has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters.Photograph by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tw

Kathleen Purvis, a food editor, wrote, “When I learned about Bessinger’s history, I stopped buying his products.”Illustration by David Sandlin In February of 2015, Kathleen Purvis, the food editor of the Charlotte Observer, drove to Birmingham, Alabama, to attend Food Media South, an annual symposium. The keynote session, “Hey, You, Pitch Me Something,” was meant to be a friendly wind-down to a we

Girls from Benin City who set out voluntarily, like Blessing, can become caught in a network of forced labor and sex work.Photograph by Alex Majoli / Magnum for The New Yorker It was close to midnight on the coast of Libya, a few miles west of Tripoli. At the water’s edge, armed Libyan smugglers pumped air into thirty-foot rubber dinghies. Some three thousand refugees and migrants, mostly sub-Saha

With just fourteen short stories and a novella, the author behind the recent film “Arrival” has gained a rapturous following within the genre and beyond. In the early nineteen-nineties, a few occurrences sparked something in Ted Chiang’s mind. He attended a one-man show in Seattle, where he lives, about a woman’s death from cancer. A little later, a friend had a baby and told Chiang about recogniz

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Speaking to reporters late Friday night, President-elect Donald Trump revealed that he had Googled Obamacare for the first time earlier in the day. “I Googled it, and, I must say, I was surprised,” he said. “There was a lot in it that really made sense, to be honest.” He said that he regretted that the frenetic pace of the presidential campaign had prevented him from

Not long ago, utopianism was a mark of naïveté or extremism; now pragmatists are denigrated for complacent cynicism.Illustration by Golden Cosmos Five hundred years ago, a man who condoned torture, religious persecution, and burning at the stake wrote a book about the perfect world. In “On the Best Kind of a Republic and About the New Island of Utopia” (the book’s full title, translated from Latin

Le Guin says she is “not just trying to get into other minds but other beings.”Illustration by Essy May Politics has been obsessing a lot of people lately, and Ursula K. Le Guin is far from immune to bouts of political anger. In an e-mail to me last winter, she wrote that she felt “eaten up” with frustration at the ongoing occupation of an eastern Oregon wildlife refuge by an armed band of antigov

“I wanted to disappear,” one man said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.”Illustration by Guy Billout Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County

Scientists once saw itching as a form of pain. They now believe it to be a different order of sensation.Photograph by Gerald Slota It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’

A new study found that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt.Illustration by Tim Lahan In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of decidu

The daily work of a hospice nurse, who treats the physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of people at the most vulnerable point of their lives. Heather Meyerend examines Mary, a ninety-two-year-old woman, at her home, in Marine Park, Brooklyn, in September, 2015. Mary died later that month. Heather believes in caring for the whole person, body and mind.Photograph by Eugene Richards for The N

A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died.Photograph from Rolls Press / Popperfoto / Getty I—A Noiseless FlashAt exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East

Bill Campbell instructed Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and countless other entrepreneurs on the human dimensions of management.Photograph by Stephen Lam / REUTERS In the brief history of modern Silicon Valley, Bill Campbell, who died yesterday, at the age of seventy-five, is a giant. His various titles—Columbia football coach, Apple executive, co-founder of Go Corp., Intuit C.E.O., chairman of Apple, ch

This week Mark Zuckerberg announced a new video-streaming service, Facebook Live, the next step in his company’s mission to control every aspect of our digital experience.Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty It's often difficult inside a closed system to see the boundaries that surround you. Sometimes you think you can see the whole of the universe. This is how closed systems like it: t

Graham Greene kept a dream journal to help ward off writer’s block.Photograph by Rene Saint Paul / RDA / Everett In 1920, a sixteen-year-old Graham Greene decided that, after “104 weeks of monotony, humiliation, and mental pain,” he could no longer remain at Berkhamsted, the prep school where he was enrolled. He fled, leaving behind a note of resignation for his parents—his father was the school’s

A group of researchers believed that subjecting tissues to trauma could give ordinary cells stem-cell-like properties.Illustration by Chad Hagen Yoshiki Sasai was known as “the brainmaker.” One of Japan’s foremost developmental biologists, he made discoveries that illuminated the formation of the embryonic nervous system, and, using stem cells, he grew the optic cup, parts of the cerebral cortex,